MediXserve builds unified medical records system via blockchain

MediXserve CEO Jojy Azurin together with two other executives of the health tech company

MediXserve, a healthtech startup, is rolling out a unified blockchain-based electronic medical record (EMR) system to make patients’ medical histories trackable.

The system, which MediXserve said is a first for the Philippines, will be a centralized database of medical records accessible — upon the patient’s approval — to anyone and anywhere.

“The technology will allow you to access all your medical records from all the doctors that you’ve been to, to all the hospitals you were confined since the day you were born,” Jorge C. Azurin, founder and CEO of MediXserve said.

“Now, people will say technology is already available. Actually, hindi (no)… it’s really difficult because you have one hospital using a different system, another hospital using a different system, so the inter-operability is difficult, so blockchain fixes it,” Mr. Azurin explained.

The Philippine-based health care services company has acquired several existing businesses with existing revenues and branded products, namely ShineOS+, Medixhome Care, Lifedata Systems Inc., and MyCareBuddy. Combined sales of these products has reached $5 million, MediXserve said. The price of its software ranges from just $50,000 to $1.1 million.

“We take patient medical history and we provide permanent, trackable, streamlined framework for the storage of that data. We provide it in a centralized manner, so it becomes more cost effective because…it becomes a paperless transaction. On the network, it becomes faster and more efficient as well as accurate in aid of decision support and diagnostic,” said Oliver V. Chato, MediXserve head for Blockchain Applications and System Integration.

The company said an offline version will be provided for areas where internet connection is limited. Users will input the data even with no internet connection, save it in a flash drive and upload it later when there is a connection.

Mr. Azurin said the data in the platform will be secure since blockchain is “unhackable,” with any attempt to change data in the system likely to be detected and rejected immediately as they are stored in chronologically — and linearly-connected blocks.

The company mainly targets developing countries, with health care expenditures in these economies seen to rise to $4 trillion by 2020. In the Philippines, health spending is seen growing to P1.2 trillion by 2022.

“Ang target market namin (Our target market) is the Philippines and selected countries like Nigeria, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Egypt, even Europe… We already have team members operating there. It is a Philippine company that’s going for global operations,” Mr. Azurin said.

He said the company is raising up to $20 million from foreign investors to boost its operations.

“Most of the investors are in Southeast Asia, a lot are based in Singapore mostly in the health and blockchain industry.”